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‘The Walking Dead’ is back in fighting shape after Sunday night’s ‘Clear’ with a surprise reunion and some of the best writing of the season.

[Spoiler Warning]

AMC’s The Walking Dead has had an on-and-off third season, but Sunday night’s episode brought all the show’s magic back—and what tense, creepy magic it is.

‘Clear’ abandons, temporarily, the conflict between the prison and Woodbury. It leaves the wider cast behind, and not one single frame is devoted to Andrea.

Instead, the unlikely troupe of Rick, Carl, and Michonne heads back to the Grimes’s old stomping grounds to get at all those guns Rick left behind at the police station.

There is no sub-plot, even though for a brief time the characters’ paths diverge. The entire episode focuses on this small band entering a much-transformed home town.

I suppose it wasn’t much of a guess, but I knew that they’d find Morgan the moment they started wandering through Rick’s home town. They had to bring him back at some point—or at least I hoped they would.

Then again, I didn’t expect he’d be in such bad shape.

Following the truly horrible death of his son, who was killed by his zombified wife after Morgan was unable to kill her previously, the man has spiraled into madness. His symptoms include elaborate booby-traps, writing inscrutable sentences on the walls of his apartment, and gathering together one of the most impressive gun collections on television.

Morgan, played by an absolutely riveting Lennie James, is a changed man, and not for the better. When he sees Rick he screams that walkers are now wearing the faces of the dead.

When he finally stumbles into lucidity, Morgan is bitter and angry. Part of him blames Rick for not staying in touch over the radio; but mostly he blames himself. Mostly, he’s lost all hope. His loneliness has destroyed him.

Maybe Rick starts to understand this when he thinks of the prison, of the people waiting there, when he tells Morgan, desperately, the he must come back from this—not just back with them, but back from this.

For all he’s lost, Rick still has his people. So even though Morgan just stabbed him in the chest, and tried to shoot him, and is obviously deeply troubled, and even though tensions are high enough with Merle haunting the place, Rick asks him to come back to the prison. Because Rick is still a good man who believes and has hope.

“You will be torn apart by teeth or bullets, you and your boy,” Morgan warns him. The good people and the bad people will die, he says, it’s the weak—like Morgan himself—who have inherited the earth.

“I have to clear,” he says, refusing the invitation. Rick nods, but doesn’t ask him what he means. Amidst all the writing on the wall, that one word is repeated time and time again in red: Clear.

What a glorious scene. What a moment of genuine raw emotion in a show that misses as often as it hits with moments like this.

However far our merry band has fallen, how much further they could have gone had they all been on their own.

It’s never stated overtly, but this is an episode that reminds us that there is strength in number; not just brute strength, either, but communal fortitude—the psychological power that comes from sticking it out together rather than holed up alone in a room with only the cold, lonely barrels of a myriad guns to keep you company.

Even the elder Dixon boy, Merle, for all his bluster and bigotry, wants to be part of the collective.

Rick’s people have that sense of family that the Governor could never manufacture in his Woodburian illusion. For all the people and guns the Governor surrounds himself with, it’s the heads of walkers and dead humans with whom he keeps his company. He was engulfed by his own solitude long ago.

Speaking of solitude, Michonne has finally emerged from her own self-inflicted silence and isolation.

She makes an effort to be friendly, helpful, and even speak up a little bit with things like opinions and suggestions and such. It’s as if the writers suddenly decided that hey, Michonne has all this potential to be a really cool character if we can just stop her sulking for a while and have her act like a real human being.

In one swift, and at this point almost out-of-character episode, Michonne gains Carl’s trust and begins to gain Rick’s.

In fact, I think she had more lines in this one short episode than she’s had so far in the entire show. Between last week’s confrontation with Andrea and this week’s scavenging, Michonne is quickly becoming the character I hoped she would be (though I won’t hold my breath. Once she gets back to camp she could devolve back into the chatty, lovable character she’s been all season.) Meanwhile, Andrea was blissfully absent.

Really, though, what I loved about ‘Clear’ is that it felt—and I hate to say this about a show that’s been around less than three full seasons—but it felt “old school.” It was character-driven but not tedious; it had a small, personal scope and didn’t spend time on characters we don’t care about.

There was nothing superfluous or gratuitous or out of place, no weird character motivations we can’t stomach. It was all menace and pain and camaraderie mixed up in that weird concoction only good zombie television can deliver. And it delivered in spades.

The episode opens on the three of them in a car passing up a hitch-hiker who begs for their help. When they become stuck he almost catches up with them, but they drive away again. At the end of the episode they pass his mutilated corpse.

The car backs up, stops, and someone reaches out and grabs the back-pack the man had been carrying and they drive off.

It’s a perfect way to finish this episode. Whatever we glimpsed between Rick and Morgan, however far these two men had fallen in their separate quests for survival, we saw perhaps an even more poignant portrait in the hitchhiker’s fate. The expressionless acceptance that they had allowed this death to happen; the utilitarian scavenging of the dead man’s belongings.

We’ll stop for your pack, but not for you.

There’s a silent appraisal, a consensus between Rick, Michonne and Carl. These aren’t thieves or killers—they didn’t go out and murder the soldiers like the Governor did—but these are survivors.

The question is, how far are they willing to go in order to survive? Where’s the line in the sand? Where does the letting a man die leave off and the killing a man begin?

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This episode was probably my favorite of the entire series. The rest of this season I would at best rate as a 4/10 while this episode was a solid 9. The focus on a small group of characters without any unnecessary drama which would have been solved by simple communication is exactly what this show needed.

I normally have a strong bias against filler episodes. And by filler, I mean episodes in a serial that do nothing to advance the main plot. But this was practically a perfect one-off. Easily the best episode of the season and one of the best of the series (hah, I know its unfair to deride shows for not being serialized enough then grade each episode individually but bear with me).

I never liked how Rick’s madness was handled, but knowing Rick’s mental state added so much more depth to Morgan and Rick both. So while I still don’t like Rick having hallucinations, at least that plotline added to a great dramatic moment. That juxtaposition of these two men was great. Rick was looking at a very possible version of himself.

Morgan (and to a lesser extent, Michonne and Carl’s quest) also sort of gave the show a manifesto: It simply isn’t enough to just survive. Rick and company seem to still be working out the kinks of just what that means (ask the hitchhiker) but I think that lesson has been imparted on Rick. Like you said, there’s more than just physical strength in numbers, there is “psychological power.” For a show that’s so bleak, that’s quite a beautiful thing to pull off.

Of course, my love of dark twists would like to see the Woodbury/Prison conflict completely subvert this theme and show that a society of survivors just might not be possible.

It’s about time there has been some good character development and drama between people instead of petty things that go away in an instant. I kinda wish they explore more of the characters past as re-discovering who they used to be before the world ended is fascinating. Also the change in environments was nice as I felt like the shows sets have been lazy since season 2. The first season takes place in several key areas, but since season 2 it mostly focuses on one to two areas. Thankfully the town and governor has given the show a needed boost of excitement as honestly season 2 was a lot of personal drama when I look back.

This episode is definitely in top 3 of favorites from the series. The camera shots were different and worked. It was so visual too. Form beginning to end, just loved it.

I have read a lot of comments about this episode not advancing the main plot. While the prison/Woodbury takes a back seat. This episode does have plenty of value. It advances the main characters. Up to this point Michonne has been kind of 3rd tier player in the series. She is so much more in the books. I think this episode gives Rick and crew a reason to pull her in to the inner circle and set up the TV character to take on more of the same role she has in the books. The conversation Michonne and Rick had about “seeing things,” was important. Looking very forward to seeing where they go from here.

Great episode! It stretched out to its potential, examining the core issue of what would ‘we’ do in a zombie apocalypse. This show excels when it focuses on this theme at an intimate human level. The hitchhiker and Morgan provided poignant baselines to illustrate the emptiness of this new world. The whole Governor/prison theme seems cartoonish by comparison. I wish this show would take the characters out of their small town, across the country (and even the world) on a search or quest for survival, while examining humanity.

I have to say the use of the hitchhiker’s fate to reflect the group’s ruthlessness was a stroke of genius. There once was a time when Rick was the one in need of a stranger’s asylum (an event that this episode alludes to). I think Morgan has a very profound line when they part ways, when he says “don’t be” after Karl says he’s sorry. Those two words alone sent shivers down my spine.

I’m not sure, but it seems as if the writers paid homage to another story altogether. In The Last Man On Earth (1964, based on the Richard Matheson book I Am Legend – see also The Omega Man 1971 and I Am Legend 2009), Vincent Price is a survivor of a worldwide plague that turns people into vampires (sort of). He barricades himself in his house at night while the vampire/zombies try to break in and get him, while chanting for him to come out and join them. During the day, he collects their dormant corpses and drags them to a fire pit set up during the first days of the plague, which is still burning, and drops them in. Vincent Price’s character name? Morgan.

For me, the episode was spoiled from the start, and then overshadowed by, the fact that they were driving back to Rick’s home town. The thing is, they’ve been driving away from there for months and months, and now we suddenly find they can just pop back whenever they want? It just rings so false. No, we don’t know how long the drive was, but they would hardly be going far with the Governor’s war looming. Sorry, this was just bad writing.

Hate to be “that guy” but i have not seen an episode that blowed chunks as hard as this one. SSOOO many wtf?! moments with terrible editing, out of character acting and dialogue, so much so that i was sure this one was a “dream” episode. And 3 “BS!” moments come to mind.

1st. The car getting bogged at the beginning (cliche and amatuer) 2nd. The knife went ALL the way in to the hilt so Rick would have had a wound straight through to his back and would have not been able to function anywhere near what he was doing….(simple bandage is all that was needed huh? BS!) and 3rd. we have seen countless times how zombies break through glass and barriers yet for some reason that hazy weak looking glass with Carl casually leaning against it holds up against around 7 or 8 zombies…..yeah right BS!

Oh yeah another wtf moment was the hitchhiker. He was purely there to be used as a plot device for the closing part to demonstrate how they survive by essentially taking from those “too weak” to survive. (something the more fearful/selfish party members in past episodes have tried to preach as the right thing to do…….. that is letting the weak die, but not someone like Daryl in the previous episode showing nobility and self sacrifice it the face of Merl telling him to not risk his skin for nothing in return….well those 3 this episode showed themselves to be just like Merl but less honest about it)

Also, how the hell did that hitchhiker guy survive as long as he did by being so green? I mean screaming at the top of his lungs which the series has established is a no no, which someone who has survived as long as he has would know, and if he needs a ride, then god dammit take one of the gazillione cars on the streets for pete’s sake. As a plot device his inclusion had zero thought put into it. Bloody lazy.

There were heaps more wtf moments so im going to be a little more hesitant in praise of this series if the producers/directors think they can get away with that kind of lazy work. And frankly im surprised none of you found these issues a problem as well??!!

I am with you on this one, Banefire. I enjoyed the episode but some stuff just seemed too comically Hollywood to even make sense. I think including the hitchhiker showed a kind of lack of humanity in part by Rick and Michonne…and the knife going through Rick’s chest and then being totally fine should have just been completely excluded even if you can use your imagination. Although I know the part of Carl going to get the frame is heartfelt and sweet, what I want to know is how in the heck did Michonne go around the building and pop out with the frame…??? I am assuming it was a different one because she would have had to kill the walkers inside? Also the end of picking up the hitchhiker’s bag was a little unncessary…I mean in the end how is the few supplies that you might find really going to be worth?

While I agree, we are however talking about a zombie apocalypse show. The worst part was when Morgan decided not to go with them. Too bad, he is a good actor, wish I can see him more of him on the show. As to wtf moments, was it lazy, maybe. or did it just help in telling the main story. I guess the part that I really followed is the relationship between Rick and Morgan, it brought back season 1 and the reality of how Rick and the group acted with the hitchhiker just showed how far they have come. Yet, with Rick and Michonee, you see that there is still hope.